THE SUBLIME

A STUDY OF CRITICAL THEORIES

IN XVIII-CENTURY ENGLAND

BY
SAMUEL H. MONK

With a new Preface by the author

ANN ARBOR PAPERBACKS

THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS

First edition as an Ann Arbor Paperback I960
Copyright © by The University of Michigan I960
All rights reserved
Second printing 1962
First published by the Modern Language Association of America in I935
Published in the United States of America by
The University of Michigan Press and simultaneously
in Toronto, Canada, by Ambassador Books Limited
Manufactured in the United States of America
PREFACE
THIS book records in some detail the history of an idea-the sublime-
during something more than a century of aesthetic and critical speculation
in Great Britain. It isolates for study one aspect of a complex subject
which includes theories of the beautiful, the picturesque, and the possi-
bility of a standard of taste and which has important bearings on arts other
than literature, notably painting and architecture. Moreover it describes
some of the shifts that occurred in cultivated or merely fashionable taste
during the eighteenth century, most notably in respect to the aesthetic
enjoyment of wild and mountainous scenery and to the deployment in
literature and painting of such intense emotions as rapture, awe, terror,
and horror.
Twenty-five years ago I wrote: "The development of the sublime was
a sort of Methodist revival in art." Today that statement seems to me,
like most analogies, a good deal more clever than true. The Augustans
of the late seventeenth and the earlier part of the eighteenth centuries,
like their twentieth-century descendants, could enjoy quite different sorts
of art or of natural scenery. If the articulate admirers of the vast in nature
and of what the critic John Dennis called the "enthusiastic passions" in
art were in the minority before the 1760's, they were none the less present;
and that most typically reserved and reasonable of Augustans, Joseph
Addison, as early as 1712 had found a place for the vast along with the
uncommon and the limited, ordered, symmetrical, and unified "beauty"
of current taste, among his "pleasures of the imagination." It is perhaps
worth remarking that Gulliver's Travels and James Thomson's Winter
were published in the same year ( 172 6) and made their way together in
popular esteem. But it is also useful to recall that after the 1740's (for
reasons not unrelated to the subject of this book) The Seasons survived
changes in taste and retained its popularity when Gulliver's Travels was
becoming unacceptable to a great many readers who nonetheless acknowl-
edged its brilliance. It seems to me preferable not to regard the cult of the
sublime as a revolutionary movement outside of and against neo-classical
standards of taste ( though eventually it certainly helped to overthrow
those standards), but rather as the other, the constantly present but before
the 1740's not always eagerly visited, pole on which the world of eighteenth-
century art turned.
Since the publication of this book in 1935, a number of scholars have
published works that valuably supplement and occasionally correct my
iv THE SUBLIME

work. The most important of these, it seems to me, are Ernest Tuveson's
article "Space, Deity, and the 'Natural Sublime'," MLQ XII (1951),
20-38; H.V.S. and Margaret S. Ogden's English Taste in Landscape in the
CONTENTS
Seventeenth Century (Ann Arbor, 1955); and Marjorie Nicolson's Moun-
tain Gloom and Mountain Glory (Ithaca, 1959), which among them help INTRODUCTION I
to account on quite other grounds than those that I have suggested for
the emergence of a taste for sublime scenery in late seventeenth-century l. LONGINUS AND THE LONGINIAN TRADITION IN ENGLAND IO
Britain. Walter J. Hipple's The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Picturesque II. BOILEAU AND SILVAIN . 29
( Carbondale, Illinois, 19 57) is a rigorously conducted philosophical analy-
sis of his subject. Finally, J. T. Boulton has provided us with a superb III. THE SUBLIME AND THE PATHETIC
critical edition of Burke's Enquiry (London, 19 58), perhaps the most IV. THE SUBLIME IN TRANSITION
influential discussion of sublimity produced in the eighteenth century.
V. BURKE'S Enquiry
Minneapolis S.H.M.
VI. THE SEVENTEEN-SIXTIES: SUBLIMITY,
PSYCHOLOGY, AND ORIGINAL GENIUS IOI

VII. THE FINAL PHASE

VIII. A GLANCE AHEAD
IX. THE SUBLIME IN p AINTING
X. THE SUBLIME IN NATURAL SCENERY 203

XI. CONCLUSION 2 33

BIBLIOGRAPHY 2 3'7

INDEX 247

ERRATA
p. 23, 1. 21, and note 47: For Rhapsody read Rapsody.
p. 24, 1. 26: For Lanson read Lawson.
p. 25,note 54: ForLansonreadLawson.
p. 73, note 26: For January, 1747 read January, 1744.
p. 80, note 48: For Lawrence read Laurence.
p. 87, 1. 26: For that read which.
p. ro7, 1. 26: For Lanson read Lawson.
p. ro7, note 16: For Lanson read Lawson.
p. 124, 1. 19: For MacPherson read Macpherson.
p. 125,l. 1: Fororreadof.
p. 168, 1. 17: For Freart read Freart.
p. 168, note 8: For Freart read Freart.
p. 170, I. 28: For Vice-Roy read Viceroy.
p. 173, 1. 3 7: For Freart read Freart.
p. 189, 1. 19: For MacPherson read Macpherson.
p. 203,l. 25: ForLorrainereadLorrain.
p. 205, 1. 4: For Macaulay's read Arnold's.
p. 212, 1. 14: For MacPherson read Macpherson.
p. 215, l. 30: For Killegrew read Killigrew.
p. 239, 1. 32: For Freart read Freart.
p. 242, 1. 38: For Lanson read Lawson.
p. 246, 1. 5: For Rhapsody read Rapsody.
p. 247: For Chambray, Freart de read Chambray, Freart de.
p. 248: For Lanson, John read Lawson, John.
INTRODUCTION
A LL students of the eighteenth century are familiar with the fact
that during that period there was throughout Europe an immense
amount of speculation on resthetic questions. This was true of Britain,
and although most of the British writers of this sort doubtless deserve
Croce's scornful epithet "scribblers," it is in such writings that one can
see expressed with varying degrees of completeness the tastes and artistic
values or confusion of values that :find expression in the arts in England
during the years when neo-classicism was dominant and when it was in
decay. Under a great variety of titles, a great variety of men at one time
or other composed an essay or a book or a poem on taste or beauty or
sublimity or the pleasures of the imagination or the art of poetry, of
painting, or of music. Not everyone who wrote had something to say,
but on the part of both philosopher and connoisseur (and most :fine gentle-
men had a "taste") considerable interest was manifested in the questions
of why objects are beautiful and how those objects affect one. On the
part of philosophers this was probably due to the emphasis which
empiricism had placed on sensation, with the resultant interest in psy-
chology of a rudimentary sort; as for the connoisseur, he was doubtless
merely following a fashion in philosophy in an age when cultivated leisure
permitted every gentleman to take pen in hand.
The result of this abundant speculation is a mass of material that has
never been systematically sorted and arranged. The great age of res-
thetic theory was of course the nineteenth century, when German
thought predominated in England as elsewhere. Consequently the stand-
ard histories of resthetic, such as Max Schasler's Kritische Geschichte der
Aesthetik, Heinrich von Stein's Die Entstehung der Neuern Aesthetik, and
Bernard Bosanquet's History of Aesthetic have perforce treated the
eighteenth century with a becoming brevity, out of respect for the
claims of proportion. In such general histories English thought neces-
sarily commands only a small amount of space; the more important
thinkers are treated concisely and simpiy, individual ideas are discussed
but briefly, and the minor :figures appear not at all.
Some interesting essays on eighteenth-century resthetic exist, for ex-
ample, Folkierski's Entre le Classicisme et le Romantisme, which is con-
cerned mainly with Diderot, but which is a helpful book to the student
of the pre-romantic period; the introductory chapter of Basch's Essai
Critique sur l' Esthetique de Kant; numerous specialized treatises by Ger-
 2 THE SUBLIME
man students, such as Candrea's Der Begrijf des Erhabenen bei Burke und
Kant, or Hofmann's Die Lehre vom Erhabenen bei Kant und seinen
V orgiingern, and numerous articles in the various learned journals, many
of which are listed in the Appendix of Professor Draper's excellent
Eighteenth Century English Aesthetics: A Bibliography. These are gen-
erally concerned with a study of thought in more than one country, or
again considerations of space have forced the writers to restrict their
observations to single men or single ideas.
There should be room, therefore, for a detailed study of one of the
leading resthetic ideas in eighteenth-century England. Beauty, sublimity,
taste, imagination, and the picturesque are the most important of these
ideas. Their rise, transformation, and progress are interesting and the
complete history of any one of them should throw light upon the progress
of taste, the change of values, and the gradual growth of critical and
resthetic theories in the period that lies between the flourishing of neo-
classicism and the triumph of romanticism, or romanticisms (as Pro-
fessor Lovejoy has taught us to say).
Such a study is undertaken here, and it has seemed wise to concen-
trate attention almost wholly upon England, at the expense of a broadly
historical point of view. The writer is not unaware that thought through-
out the whole of the eighteenth century was strikingly cosmopolitan,
and that for the historian of ideas France and Germany are as important
as England for him who would give a complete picture of the age. The
aim of this book, however, is only to trace the history of one idea, the
sublime, as it developed in England, and this can be done within a
reasonable space only by the deliberate overemphasis that has been
here employed.
But the task of carrying out a piece of narrowly specialized research
is not necessarily easier because of its restricted field. Everyone is famil-
iar with the fact that a mountain which seems perfectly shaped when
seen from a great distance loses that shape and becomes a formless mass
when one approaches its base. The same is certainly true of the history
of ideas. It is possible to sketch in the general outlines, but closer in-
spection will reveal the complexity of a design that seemed at first to
be quite simple and obvious. The danger, of course, is that the outline
will be entirely obscured by close study. The history of an idea is com-
plex because thought is organic, and every thought in every period is
in some way conditioned by other thoughts. The difficulty, therefore,
is that the history of an idea may tend to grow into the history of a
period, and one is tempted to avoid this danger by tearing up the idea
by its roots, dissociating it from the soil in which it has flourished, and
presenting it, a withered fragment, to an unenthusiastic world. Certainly
INTRODUCTION 3
a study of the sublime in England comes very near being a study of
English thought and arts, for we find the idea applied to rhetoric, to
literature, to painting, to sculpture, to music, to biblical criticism, and to
natural scenery; and it has its roots in the psychology and the philoso-
phy of the times. If this volume errs, and it does err, it is rather in the
human failure of not doing enough, than in the heroic attempt to treat
the subject fully. I have attempted to find as many theories of sublimity
as possible, and to summarize them clearly and truthfully, relating them
incidentally to contemporary movements in literature; to follow out
the history of the idea as it was applied to painting and to the enjoy-
ment of natural scenery; and to view all of these theories as an im-
portant link in the chain of ideas that, through various transformations,
connects organically the literature of the Augustan age with that of
the age of Wordsworth.
The chaos of which Croce has complained in English resthetic specu-
lation in the eighteenth century does not diminish as one begins to ex-
plore what was written during that extremely prolific age. And this is
especially true of writings on the sublime. When Martin Shee, in his
Elements of Art, 1809, looked back over the field of English thought in
the preceding century, he was impelled to attack the whole tradition of
the sublime as "the insane point of the critical compass;" for, he says,
those who talk rationally on other subjects, no sooner touch on this, than they
go off in a literary delirium; fancy themselves, like Longinus, "the great sublime
they draw," and rave like methodists, of inward lights, and enthusiastic emo-
tions, which, if you cannot comprehend, you are set down as un-illumined by
the grace of criticism, and excluded from the elect of Taste.
There is much too much truth in this bit of satire. But although such
writings may not throw much light on the perplexed problems of the
philosophy of art, they are an excellent guide to a knowledge of what
the eighteenth-century Englishman desired in art; and it is just because
they give expression to "enthusiasm" that they are important as enshrin-
ing tastes and tendencies, inimical to the well-ordered and rational world
that the neo-classical age had erected on the foundation of Cartesianism.
Theories of beauty are relatively trim and respectable; but in theories
of the sublime one catches the century somewhat off its guard, sees it,
as it were, without powder and pomatum, whalebone and patches.
To reduce to any sort of order the extremely diverse and individual-
istic theories of sublimity that one finds in the eighteenth century is
not easy. For instance, it has not been possible to write a "triumph" of
the sublime in England; or to lead carefully up to a particular treatise
and say, "Just here the sublime is transformed, with the following im-
portant results." Indeed, the chief problem has been the problem of